About First

First is the Healthcare Advisory Firm That Never Stops Adding Value

Leadership Team

The Management team at First includes some of the most experienced and talented healthcare business and cybersecurity leaders in the industry, who consistently demonstrate the vision necessary for leading a national healthcare advisory organization. Our team separates itself by by leveraging a wide network of relationships in areas that strengthen our core expertise to the ultimate benefit of our clients. Each First manager is focused on HIT advisory and cybersecurity, providing our clients focused expertise in the field and issues driving healthcare transformation.

Randy Bailey

Chairman

Randy is a Founder and the Chairman of First Health Advisory. He has spent his entire career in healthcare information technology. For the past 15-years First has provided advisory services to leading healthcare institutions across the United States, recognized as leader in connected asset risk management services. Randy is focused on ensuring that First evolves to support the primary needs of First’s clients and positions the company to engage in forward thinking solutions. Under Randy’s leadership First continues to serve both federal and commercial healthcare entities as First develops solution sets to meet the changing needs of healthcare clients. With his Masters in Healthcare Administration, a Senior HIMSS designee, and with First Health Advisory a Foundation Firm of CHIME Randy is excited for the future challenges in healthcare information technology.

Carter Groome

Chief Executive Officer

Carter is a Founder and the Chief Executive Officer of First. He brings 24 years of healthcare information technologymanagement, consulting, and security leadership experience to the company. As Chief Executive Officer, Carter is able to draw upon his cyber health, consulting, and vendor leadership background to benefit First’s commercial and Federal clients and partners. Before becoming CEO of First in 2010, Carter was Executive Vice President responsible for sales, marketing and strategic direction. Prior to founding First, he was the Director of Business Development at Park City Solutions. Carter spent 5 years as an applications and integration Program Manager and consultant in the healthcare information technology arena with First Choice Consulting.Prior to his consulting career, Carter held various IT management positions with Adventist HealthCare.Carter holds a B.S. in Health Science from the University of Arizona and a M.B.A. from Johns Hopkins University.

Jack Wagner

VP - Advisory Services

Jack brings 32 years of Information Technology experience to First’s VP of Advisory role, with the past 17 in the healthcare industry. Jack’s extensive background in technology, security, program/project management, and hospital IT management guides our risk management programs. His broad experience allows him to focus on the macro-level while tracing the inner workings of the organizations with which he assists in performing tight integration of technologies, processes, and governmental regulations. Before joining First, Jack was the Area Vice President of Consulting Services (South Central US) for maxIT-VCS and the Technical Services Manager for St. Vincent Health System in Little Rock, AR. Previous to these positions, Jack was on active duty in the United States Marine Corps. Jack is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and has worked on various IT leadership roles and large projects during his career. These include Epic Inpatient and Ambulatory projects at Mount Sinai in New York and multiple connected asset-oriented projects within the Medical Device and IoT sphere. Additionally, Jack has performed various system selection projects to identify and procure services from vendors in the IoT, Health Information Exchange (HIE), Population Management, and Data Framework technology spaces. He has in-depth knowledge of the substantial challenges facing organizations today, to include cybersecurity solutions for medical device management, policy, and infrastructure.

Kerri (Gallagher) Bass

Chief Operating Officer

Kerri is the Chief Operating Officer at First Healthcare Advisory, providing oversight of business and financial operations for the company. Kerri has extensive experience within healthcare information technology sales, marketing, recruiting and client delivery services. With her dedication to First’s clients and consultants, Kerri continually commits to positioning First as a trusted partner for clients. Prior to joining First, Kerri spent 4 years with Vitalize Consulting Solutions.Kerri holds a BS in Psychology and Marketing from Arizona State University.

Mary G. Gregg, MD, FACS, MHA

Physician Executive Advisor

Dr. Gregg is a cardio-thoracic surgeon with industry-recognized expertise in patient safety, risk management and quality improvement. Dr.Gregg uses her 20 years as surgeon and healthcare administrator to manage change within the organizations she serves to implement new electronic healthcare systems, develop better work flows, increase patient safety, and reorganize and reorient workforce efforts to provide higher quality lower cost levels of service. As a Baldrige examiner, Dr. Gregg has also been trained in to assist facilities with the Baldridge Cybersecurity Excellence Builder to help healthcare facilities adopt the NIST Cybersecurity Framework in their network.

Dr. Toby Gouker

First VP and CISO

As the former Provost for the SANS Technology Institute, Dr.Toby Gouker brings a wide breadth of privacy and security expertise to First’s cyber health practice. Coupled with years of experience in the Federal Healthcare IT industry, his expertise sits at the nexus of cybersecurity, health policy, and healthcare risk management frameworks. With over 30 years of industry experience and 10 years in the educational arena, Dr. Gouker represents the kind of scholar/practitioner you would want to have advising a healthcare organization on theoretically sound, business effective tools, techniques, and teachings to fortify a healthcare organization’s defense of its information assets.

Company Overview

First healthcare advisors and cybersecurity experts partner with our clients to derive value from investments in technology with the understanding that people will have the most significant impact on cost and quality advances.

First develops and sustains relationships by delivering dependable, budget sensitive Security, Clinical, Revenue Cycle and Advisory solutions for healthcare organizations. We understand what healthcare entities are facing today as they adapt to value based care delivery. Organizations turn to First for guidance as they navigate security concerns, regulatory mandates and interoperability challenges with constant budget pressure and frustration with EHR user experience.First works extremely hard to provide our clients with the right advisor for the program, project or role requested. The time we invest in vetting and preparing our personnel save our clients valuable time and dollars while building trust that we have, and will, provide the ideal resource. The manner in which First addresses and supports our clients interests and concerns is a key discriminator of our organization.

The People of First

Accomplished healthcare IT and security professionals that have demonstrated their problem solving expertise with healthcare information technology systems.

Provide benefit and value throughout the life of the engagement, training or partnership.

Solve and support complex clinical and cyber initiatives, allowing our clients to concentrate their resources on core priorities and business objectives.

Deliver complete and fully documented solutions.

The Clients of First:

Value our ability to deliver highly vetted and specialized advisors and a management team that has served on every side of the healthcare and cybersecurity delivery spectrum.

Value our ability to deliver the “right” solutions regardless of the complexity of the problem.

Value our flexibility in addressing the challenges in utilizing and managing consultative personnel, acting as long term partner.

The Management Team at First:

Includes some of the most experienced and talented healthcare business and cybersecurity leaders in the industry, who consistently demonstrate the vision necessary for leading a national cyber health advisory organization.

Separates itself by leveraging a wide network of Federal and commercial relationships in areas that strengthen our core expertise to the ultimate benefit of our clients.

Focuses solely on the healthcare industry and government agencies with healthcare related missions, attracting the top experts in the field.

Working at First:

First knows that prosperous employees create successful client experiences and we believe that technology can only be made meaningful through people. Our people have a superb support structure at First, creating enriched skill sets, engagements and careers. Our company is equally focused on ensuring that our employees maintain a balance with their career and family or personal lives. Our compensation, vacation policy, non-billable and bench time plans, and overall culture encourages pursuits outside of the consulting world. Our compensation package is HIGHLY competitive and there is no relocation necessary. In addition, First has a long history of working with experienced independent consultants and paying above market rates. First is committed to our employees while on billable engagements or not and we are constantly investing in our employees finding new ways to function and collaborate as a one team even though we serve many clients in multiple locations.

Vision & Approach

Today’s health tech and security initiatives go far beyond the CIO’s world. CISO’s, CMIO’s, CFO’s, clinicians and more are invested in and navigating a massive shift in how healthcare must be delivered, in how information is protected and how involved patients are in their well being.

Clients are asking questions like:

“How do we realize the value from our technology investments?”

“How do we train our non-technical employees on cybersecurity?”

“How do we ensure our security posture strikes the right data accessibility balance for healthcare?”

“How do we get our physicians to adopt our new systems?”

“How do we avoid lapses in security training and how do we measure successful education and awareness?”

“Compliance is overwhelming us, how do we get beyond just checking the box with a budget?”

Our Vision

Consensus practices on how to approach healthcare security and EHR optimization, at best, will have limited impact on bending the cost curve in your organization. Time and time again, we see that more effective strategy involves the alignment of an organization’s clinical, technical and security processes with their unique culture is a major influencer. This alignment must occur in small steps on a customized basis, as no two organizations are the same. Small success will allow for larger initiatives and capability for marked progress. First provides the experts to quickly identify efficiency issues, improve security awareness, and transfer lasting knowledge to your organization.

Our Client Approach “Dynamic Maximization”

First developed and honed and approach and methodology called FirstTRAK that measures and accelerates process efficiency to optimize clinical and cyber health components of your organization. The dynamic part of our approach refers to an understanding that no two health delivery organizations are alike and we must take socio-cultural factors into each engagement. Maximization refers to an improved state of harmony between the value influencers and the personnel side of healthcare. FirstTRAK is built to provide value in diverse implementation, optimization, privacy, security, training or even assessment efforts.

Our Advisor Approach cultivates and supports experts that are dedicated to improving the delivery of healthcare

Voted the best places to work in 2014 by Modern Healthcare magazine, employees and consultants choose to work with First. All of our advisors are experienced professionals in healthcare, security or both, in addition to their deep knowledge of the latest technology and practices. First diligently matches our advisors experience with engagements that are poised to take advantage of their background and personalities. Our people are located throughout the US, often times allowing our clients to take advantage of regional resources for smaller targeted engagements while lowering any expenses related to consultant travel. In addition, First is capable of leveraging the combined experience of our business units (Health Advisory and Cyber Health Solutions) to meet large scale deliverables with deep resource needs.